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environment

- Bottleneck

Internet In The Loop

11 December 2020

Olivier Le Goaer

android

java

Opening and closing internet connection continuously is extremely battery-inefficient since HTTP exchange is the most consuming operation of the network. This bug typically occurs when one obtain a new HttpURLConnection by calling URL#openConnection() within a loop control structure (while, for, do-while, for-each). Also, this bad practice must be early prevented because it is the root of another evil that consists in polling data at regular intervals, instead of using push notifications to save a lot of battery power.

Noncompliant Code

URL url = new URL("http://www.mysite.com");
for (;;) {
    HttpURLConnection urlConnection = (HttpURLConnection) 
    url.openConnection();
}

Compliant Solution

URL url = new URL("http://www.mysite.com");
HttpURLConnection urlConnection = (HttpURLConnection) url.openConnection();